ScienceFictionpage13.html
"...AND..."
Not alone in such thoughts
Those who can see would have them as "views"
Were the other feelings
Not of love
Aroused by the news.
Each was categorized by raised eyebrows
A flinch
Or some sneers
Perhaps some little whimper
Or hidden shed tears.
What for some was pure agony
For others held a momentary satisfaction.
Products of the history of the naive
Caught between the categories
AND abandoned as missing in action.
History in the living
Ain't the same when it's retold.
It's like accounting the debits of being bought
With the credits of being sold.
AND while the balance on hand
Suggests an equality on each side of the scales
It takes a closer examination of the journal
To see really what was gained
AND what fails.
Entry One:
Out of the many who play
There's always one too little
To fairly compete with the others.
Dismissed by powerhitting brokers
As a crybaby
AND a sissy
Who should be home with his mother.
Missing in action, missing...inaction.
Entry Two:
AND as much as all the world's a stage
There's the kid too shy
To ask his secret sweetheart to dance
Who killed a smaller calf
Had a lesser dowry to offer:
Each society's next step towards romance.
Missing in action, missing...inaction.
Entry Three:
AND in the company of these
Are the profits
From the freedom fighters' medicinal private enterprising.
Not new constitutions
Restructuring
Rebuilding
Or economic opportunities for all--
Just triggers
For ghetto arms
AND frustrations for new hopes arising.
Missing in action, missing...inaction.
Entry Five:
AND alone
Yet together with these
Pacing earthen trackless broadloom
Of homes
In distant ghettoes
Too dirty for negotiations
Are the twenty
Or fifteen
Or twenty
With housewares of politics
Mismatched furniture of different ceremony
AND familied
With regrets, pains, or frustrations.
Missing in action, missing...inaction.
Hmmm, perhaps
What for the real hero of the racetrack
Would be seen in each run off
As one isolated case
Upsets the fulcrum of the balance
Of the big picture--
Perhaps
Best categorized
As more of that so-called government waste.
Missing in action, missing...inaction.
--by GORDON C. WONG,
from "What Lies Beyond This
Door",*
copyright 1987 by GORDON C.
WONG
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